Five Myths About New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina

New Orleans underwater after Hurricane Katrina. Courtesy of Harry Shearer’s documentary film The Big Uneasy.

To journalists, fifth anniversaries are irresistible. They are “a good time for taking stock,” but, more important, they’re predictable: you can schedule the logistics and the coverage in advance and avoid last-minute airfares. (Why else do political conventions still get airtime?) So, on this fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the near drowning of New Orleans, as the media revisits certain pre-determined themes, here are five myths about the disaster that you should keep in mind—because the talking heads aren’t always right.

MYTH 1: What happened to New Orleans at the end of August 2005 was a natural disaster.

There was definitely a disaster directly related to Hurricane Katrina, but that catastrophe occurred on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where the storm came ashore as a Category 3. In one day, towns such as Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian, and Biloxi were flattened by high winds and waves. The next day, cleanup started.

When Katrina passed east of New Orleans (the hurricane was not a direct hit), the storm was likely a Category 1 or a Category 2. Check the final report by the National Hurricane Center for verification. Yet 80 percent of the city was flooded, and the city wasn’t “unwatered”—to use Army Corps of Engineers terminology—for up to six weeks.

Two independent teams of scientists and engineers investigated the cause of the flooding, and they reached remarkably similar conclusions. The event, they agreed, was a man-made disaster—the result of more than four decades’ worth of mistakes, misjudgments, and misfeasance by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency tasked by Congress to build a hurricane protection system for the city. Had the system worked correctly, one of the investigators said, the worst effect of Katrina on New Orleans would have been “wet ankles.”

MYTH 2: The problems with the levees were due to local corruption.

It’s easy to argue that Louisiana is in the big leagues of corruption, along with Illinois (several governors imprisoned) and New Jersey (you talkin’ to me?), among other states. People are wondering if U.S. attorney Jim Letten may soon be stalking the corridors of city hall like the grim reaper, carrying a scythe with former mayor Ray Nagin’s name on it. But local and state government had minimal involvement with the design and construction of the hurricane protection system. That responsibility rested firmly with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The local levee boards, responsible for keeping the grass mowed, have been totally reformed in the wake of the flood, and now have a cadre of professionals bird-dogging the Corps’s work.

MYTH 3: The primary victims of the flood were poor black people.

It’s true that most of those killed by the floodwaters were the poor, the old, and the sick. But when almost all of a metropolitan area is underwater, it’s equally true that the victims are black and white and Creole and Vietnamese, and rich, poor, and middle class. Television crews had an easy freeway off-ramp to the Superdome and the Convention Center, but they didn’t know how to get to neighboring St. Bernard Parish, a suburb where working-class white folks spent four days on their roofs in 100-degree heat with no food and water—a parish where nearly 90 percent of the housing was destroyed. Of course, recovery was easier for people with resources, whether family, neighbors, the wonderful volunteers, insurance, or checks from the Road Home. But recovery wasn’t easy for anyone.

MYTH 4: People who left New Orleans are better off.

That’s the Barbara Bush notion, first uttered when evacuees were spread across the floor of the Houston Astrodome. It reflected, to be polite, a strong imaginative vision. Amazingly, almost five years later, we have nothing more substantial to guide us on this subject. There is no authoritative census or directory of those who were bused, trained, or choppered out of harm’s way on a one-way trip to no-one-knew-where. We have anecdotal data—a friend who works in New Orleans’s housing department says her phone rings “off the hook” every day with people who want to return—but no comprehensive idea about how many of the evacuees are happier in their new locales, and how many ache to come home.

MYTH 5: The primary government failure in Katrina was the response, and Bush is responsible.

Well, President Bush was primarily responsible for the FEMA meltdown, although Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown, the head of the agency at the time, was a human piñata hung out for the media to pummel. His boss, then secretary of homeland security Michael Chertoff, attended a bird-flu briefing in Atlanta the day after Katrina hit, without any negative media coverage. Chertoff now heads a security consulting firm that sells high-priced full-body scanners for airports to the government. (Ask the Israelis why they don’t use the machines.) The primary government failure in Katrina was the failed hurricane protection system, designed and constructed under administrations of both parties. There was plenty political about this catastrophe, but nothing partisan.

And, in the New Orleans tradition of “lagniappe” (like a 13th donut when buying a dozen), here’s a BONUS MYTH: The American news media did a great job covering Katrina, putting the suffering on live television and speaking truth to power. Yes, Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu got a good stern talking-to, but, starting with a startling ignorance about the city’s geography (“I’m here in the French Quarter,” said a CNN reporter in the Central Business District on August 29, 2005) and widening out to a primary philosophical problem—“We just think the emotional stories are more compelling for our audience,” one anchor told me—the American media matched its credulous, embed-me-first performance during the Iraq-war runup with another basic failure. At least the Times and the Post apologized about Iraq.

New Orleans resident Harry Shearer has worked on The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, and the satirical rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, among other comedic projects. He is showing his feature-length Hurricane Katrina documentary, The Big Uneasy, in theaters on August 30, for one night only.